Industrial scanners are commonly used to scan surface(s) of a material for the purpose of altering or inspecting the surface. Such alteration may involve patterning of the surface using selectively applied laser radiation to deposit material from a donor sheet and/or to change or remove a layer coated on the surface. In many applications, there is a requirement to scan the surface of a material in a rectilinear fashion and when the material is a relatively flat sheet, a flat bed scanner is commonly used. Specific example applications of flat bed scanning include fabrication of flat panel displays, printed circuit boards and printing plates. The material having the surface to be scanned is placed on a table, and the table is moved rapidly back and forth underneath an optical scanning head to scan the surface along a first axis. To complete the scan of the surface, motion along a second axis orthogonal to the first axis may also be necessary depending on the configuration of the optical scanning head. This may be achieved by moving the table or by moving the optical scanning head in a direction aligned with the second orthogonal axis.
When the surface being scanned is large, the mass of such a table and the inertial forces involved in creating the relative motion between the table and the optical scanning head may become prohibitive. Prior art scanners, such as that disclosed in PCT application WO 00/49563, have sought to address this problem by supporting the material having the surface to be scanned on rollers. The scanning speed of such systems is limited by the inertia of the rollers, since the rollers still have to change direction each time that the scan direction is reversed. Additionally, the use of moving parts that can wear is undesirable in circumstances where the material must be scanned or otherwise processed in extremely clean environments. Other disadvantages of rollers include deformation caused by contact between the material and the plurality of rollers, which contact the material at a plurality of points. Continuous support is important in cases where downward pressure is applied to the material by, for example, a donor material sheet in intimate contact with the material surface.